Poetical Works of Robert Bridges excluding the eight dramas

Now in wintry delights, and long fireside meditation,
'Twixt studies and routine paying due court to the Muses,
My solace in solitude, when broken roads barricade me
Mudbound, unvisited for months with my merry children,
Grateful t'ward Providence, and heeding a slander against me
Less than a rheum, think of me to-day, dear Lionel, and take
This letter as some account of Will Stone's versification.
We, whose first memories reach half of a century backward,
May praise our fortune to have outliv'd so many dangers,—
Faultiness of Nature's unruly machinery or man's—;
For, once born, whatever 'tis worth, life is to be held to,
Its mere persistence esteem'd as real attainment,
Its crown of silver reverenc'd as one promise of youth
Fruiting, of existence one needful purpose accomplish'd:
And 'twere worth the living, howe'er unkindly bereft of
Those joys and comforts, throu' which we chiefly regard it:
Nay,—set aside the pleasant unhinder'd order of our life,
Our happy enchantments of Fortune, easy surroundings,
Courteous acquaintance, dwelling in fair homes, the delight of
Long-plann'd excursions, the romance of journeying in lands
Historic, of seeing their glory, the famous adornments
Giv'n to memorial Earth by man, decorator of all-time,
(—As we saw with virginal eyes travelling to behold them,—)
Her gorgeous palaces, her tow'rs and stately cathedrals;
Where the turrets and domes of pictured Tuscany slumber,

410

Or the havoc'd splendours of Rome imperial, or where
Glare the fretted minarets and mosks of trespassing Islam,
And old Nilus, amid the mummied suzerainty of Egypt,
Glideth, a godly presence, consciously regardless of all things,
Save his unending toil and eternal recollections:—
Set these out of account, and with them too put away art,
Those ravishings of mind, those sensuous intelligences,
By whose grace the elect enjoy their sacred aloofness
From Life's meagre affairs, in beauty's regenerate youth
Reading immortality's sublime revelation, adoring
Their own heav'nly desire; nor alone in worship assist they,
But take, call'd of God, part and pleasure in creation
Of that beauty, the first of His first purposes extoll'd:—
Yea, set aside with these all Nature's beauty, the wildwood's
Flow'ry domain, the flushing, softcrowding loveliness of Spring,
Lazy Summer's burning dial, the serenely solemn spells
Of Sibylline Autumn, with gay-wing'd Plenty departing;
All fair change, whether of seasons or bright recurrent day,
Morning or eve; the divine night's wonderous empyrean;
High noon's melting azure, his thin cloud-country, the landscape
Mountainous or maritime, blue calms of midsummer Ocean,
Broad corn-grown champaign goldwaving in invisible wind,
Wide-water'd pasture, with shade of whispering aspen;
All whereby Nature winneth our love, fondly appearing
As to caress her children, or all that in exaltation
Lifteth aloft our hearts to an unseen glory beyond her:—
Put these out of account; yea, more I say, banish also
From the credit sum of enjoyment those simple affections,
Whose common exercise informs our natural instinct;
That, set in our animal flesh-fabric, of our very lifeblood
Draw their subsistence, and even in ungenerous hearts

411

Root, like plants in stony deserts and 'neath pitiless snows.
Yea, put away all Love, the blessings and pieties of home,
All delicate heart-bonds, vital tendernesses untold,
Joys that fear to be named, feelings too holy to gaze on;
And with his inviolate peace-triumph his passionate war
Be forgone, his mighty desire, thrilling ecstasies, ardours
Of mystic reverence, his fierce flame-eager emotions,
Idolatrous service, blind faith and ritual of fire.
If from us all these things were taken away, (that is all art
And all beauty whate'er, and all love's varied affection,)
Yet would enough subsist in other concerns to suffice us,
And feed intelligence, and make life's justification.
What this is, if you should ask me, beyond or above the rejoicing
In vegetant or brute existence, answer is easy;
'Tis the reflective effort of mind that, conscious of itself,
Fares forth exploring nature for principle and cause,
Keenly with all the cunning pleasure and instinct of a hunter,
Who, in craft fashioning weapon and sly snare, tracketh after
His prey flying afield, and that which his arm killeth eateth.
History and science our playthings are: what an untold
Wealth of inexhaustive treasure is stored up for amusement!
Shall the amass'd Earth-structure appeal to me less than in early
Childhood an old fives-ball, whose wraps I wondering unwound,
Untwining the ravel'd worsted, that mere rubbish and waste
Of leather and shavings had bound and moulded elastic
Into a perfect sphere? Shall not the celestial earth-ball
Equally entertain a mature enquiry, reward our
Examination of its contexture, conglomerated
Of layer'd debris, the erosion of infinite ages?
Tho' I lack the wizard Darwin's scientific insight
On the barren sea-beaches of East Patagonia gazing,

412

I must wond'ring attend, nay learn myself to decipher
Time's rich hieroglyph, with vast elemental pencil
Scor'd upon Earth's rocky crust,—minute shells slowly collecting
Press'd to a stone, uprais'd to a mountain, again to a fine sand
Worn, burying the remains of an alien organic epoch,
In the flat accretions of new sedimentary strata;
All to be crush'd, crumpled, confused, contorted, abandon'd,
Broke, as a child's puzzle is, to be recompos'd with attention;
Nature's history-book, which she hath torn as asham'd of;
And lest those pictures on her fragmentary pages
Should too lightly reveal frustrate Antiquity, hath laid
Ruin upon ruin, revolution upon revolution:
Yet no single atom, no least insignificant grain
But, having order alike of fate, and faulty disorder,
Holds a record of Time, very vestiges of the Creation;
Which who will not attend scorns blindly the only commandments
By God's finger of old inscribed on table of earth-stone.

This for me wer' enough: yet confin'd Geology's field
Counts not in all Science more than the planet to the Cosmos;
Where our central Sun, almighty material author,
And sustainer, appears as a half-consumed vanishing spark,
Bearing along with it, entangled in immensity's onward
Spiral eddies, the blacken'd dust-motes whirl'd off from around it.
But tho' man's microscopical functions measure all things
By his small footprints, finger-spans and ticking of clocks,
And thereby conceive the immense—such multiple extent
As to defy Ideas of imperative cerebration,—
None the less observing, measuring, patiently recording,
He mappeth out the utter wilderness of unlimited space;
Carefully weigheth a weight to the sun, reckoneth for it its path
Of trackless travelling, the precise momentary places

413

Of the planets and their satellites, their annual orbits,
Times, perturbations of times, and orbit of orbit.

What was Alexander's subduing of Asia, or that
Sheep-worry of Europe, when pigmy Napoleon enter'd
Her sovereign chambers, and her kings with terror eclips'd?
His footsore soldiers inciting across the ravag'd plains,
Thro' bloody fields of death tramping to an ugly disaster?
Shows any crown, set above the promise (so rudely accomplisht)
Of their fair godlike young faces, a glory to compare
With the immortal olive that circles bold Galileo's
Brows, the laurel'd halo of Newton's unwithering fame?
Or what a child's surmise, how trifling a journey Columbus
Adventur'd, to a land like that which he sail'd from arriving,
If compar'd to Bessel's magic divination, awarding
Magnificent Sirius his dark and invisible bride;
Or when Adams by Cam, (more nearly Leverrier in France,)
From the minutely measur'd vacillation of Uranus, augur'd
Where his mighty brother Neptune went wandering unnamed,
And thro' those thousand-million league-darknesses of space
Drew him slowly whene'er he pass'd, and slowly released him!
Nil admirari! 'Tis surely a most shabby thinker
Who, looking on Nature, finds not the reflection appalling.

And if these wonders we must with wonder abandon,
Astronomy's Cosmos, the Immense, and those physical laws
That link mind to matter, laws mutual in revelation,
Which measure and analyse Nature's primordial orgasm,
Lifegiving omnipotential Light, its speed to determine,
Untwist its rainbow of various earthcoloring rays,
Counting strictly to each its own millionth-millimetred
Wave-length, and mapping out on fray'd diffraction of ether
All the adust elements and furnaced alchemy of heav'n;
Laws which atone the disorder of infinit observation
With tyrannous numbers and abstract theory, closing

414

Protean Nature with nets of principle exact;
Her metamorphoses transmuting by correlation,
All heat, all chemical concourse or electrical action,
All force and all motion of all matter, or subtle or gross:—

If we these wonders, I say, with wonder abandon,
Nor can for mental heaviness their high study pursue,
Yet no story of adventures or fabulous exploit
Of famous'd heroes hath so romantic a discourse,
As these growing annals of long heav'n-scaling achievement
And far discoveries, which he who idly neglecteth
Is but a boor as truly ridiculous as the village clown,
In whose thought the pleasant sun-ball performeth a circuit
Daily above mother earth, and resteth nightly beneath her.

Nor will a man, whose mind respects its own operations,
Lightly resign himself to remain in darkness uninform'd,
While any true science of fact lies easy within reach
Concerning Nature's eternal essential object,
Self-matter, embodying substratum of ev'ry relation
Both of Time and Space, at once the machinery and stuff
Of those Ideas; carrier, giver, only receiver
Of such perceptions as arise in sensible organs.

Now whether each element is a coherency of equal
Strictly symmetric atoms, or among themselves the atoms are
Like animals in a herd, having each an identity distinct,
—So that atoms of gold compar'd with sulphur or iron
Are but as ancient Greeks compar'd with Chinamen and Turks;—
Nor whether all elements are untransmutable offspring
From one kind or more thro' endless eternity changing,
Or whether invisibles claim rightly the name of immortals,
I make no enquiry; matter minutely divided
Showing a like paradox, with ever-continuous extent,
And, as Adam, the atom will pose as a naked assumption:—
But since all the knowledge which man was born to attain to
Hath these only channels, (which must limit and qualify it,)

415

We shall con the grammar, the material alphabet of life,
Yea, ev'n more from error to preserve our inquisitive mind,
Than to secure well-being against adversity and ill.
Surely if all is a flux, 'tis well to look into the fluid,
Inspect and question the apparent, shifty behaviour,
Wherein lurketh alone our witness of all physical law,
As we read the habits unchanging of invisible things,
Their timeless chronicles, the unintelligent ethic of dust:
In which dense labyrinth he who was guiding avised me,
With caution saying ‘Were this globe's area of land
‘Wholly cover'd from sight, pack'd close to the watery margins
‘With mere empty vessels, I could myself put in each one
‘Some different substance, and write its formula thereon.’

Thus would speak the chemist; and Nature's superabundance,
Her vast infinitude of waste variety untold,
As her immense extent and inconceivable object,
Squandering activities throughout eternity, dwarfeth
Man's little aim and hour, his doubtful fancy: what are we?
Our petty selfseekings, our speedily passing affections?
Life having existed so extravagantly before us;
Earth bearing so slight a regard or care for us; and all
After us unconcern'd to remain, strange, beautiful as now.
May not an idle echo of an antique poetry haunt me,
‘Friendship is all feigning, yea all loving is folly only’?
—Yet doth not very mention of antique poetry and love
Quickly recall to better motions my dispirited faith?
And I see man's discontent as witness asserting
His moral ideal, that, born of Nature, is heir to
Her children's titles, which nought may cancel or impugn;
Not wer' of all her works man least, but ranking among them
Highly or ev'n as best, he wrongs himself to imagine
His soul foe to her aim, or from her sanction an outlaw.

416

Nay, but just as man should appear more fully accordant
With things not himself, would they rank with him as equals:
Judging other creatures he sets them wholly beneath him;
His disquiet among manifold and alien objects
Being sure evidence, the effect of an understanding,
And perception allow'd by Nature solely to himself.

Highly then is to be prais'd the resourceful wisdom of our time,
That spunged out the written science and theories of life,
And, laying foundation of its knowledge in physical law,
Gave it preeminence o'er all enquiry, erecting
Superstructive of all, bringing ev'ry research to the object,
Boldly a new science of MAN, from dreamy scholastic
Imprisoning set free, and inveterate divination,
Into the light of truth, to the touch of history and fact.

Since ‘the proper study of mankind is man’,—nor aforetime
Was the proverb esteem'd as a truism less than it is now,—
'Tis strange that the method lay out of sight unaccomplisht,
And that we, so late to arrive, should first set a value
On the delusive efforts of human babyhood; and so
Witnessing impatiently the rear of their disappearance,
Upgathering the relics and vestiges of primitive man,
Should ratify instinct for science, look to the darkness
For light, find a knowledge where 'twas most groping or unknown:
While civilization's advances mutely regarding
Talk we of old scapegoats, discuss bloodrites, immolations,
Worship of ancestors; explain complexities involved
Of tribal marriages, derivation of early religions,
Priestly taboos, totems, archaic mysteries of trees,
All the devils and dreams abhorr'd of barbarous ages.

And 'tis a far escape from wires, wheels and penny papers
And the worried congestion of our Victorian era,

417

Whose many inventions of world-wide luxury have changed
Life's very face:—but enough we hear of progress, enough have
Our conscious science and comforts trumpeted; altho'
Hardly can I, who so many years eagerly frequented
Bartholomew's fountain, not speak of things to awaken
Kind old Hippocrates, howe'er he slumbereth, entomb'd
'Neath the shatter'd winejars and ruined factories of Cos,
Or where he wander'd in Thessalian Larissa:
For when his doctrine, which Rome had wisely adopted,
Sank lost with the treasures of her deep-foundering empire,
No art or science grew so contemptible, order'd
So by mere folly, windy caprice, superstition and chance,
As boastful Medicine, with humours fit for a madhouse,
Save when some Sydenham, like Samson among the Philistines,
Strode bond-bursting along with a smile of genial instinct.
Nor when here and there some ray, in darkness arising,
Hopefully seem'd to herald the coming dawn, (as when a Laennec
Or Jenner invented his meed of worthy remembrance,)
Did one mind foresee, one seer foretell the appearance
Of that unexpected daylight that arose upon our time.

Who dream'd that living air poison'd our surgery, coating
All our sheeny weapons with germs of an invisible death,
Till he saw the sterile steel work with immunity, and save
Quickly as its warring scimitars of victory had slain?
Saw what school-tradition for nature's kind method admir'd,
—In those lifedraining slow cures and bedridden agues,—
Forgotten, or condemn'd as want of care in a surgeon?

Tho' Medicine makes not so plain an appeal to the vulgar,
Yet she lags not a whit: her pregnant theory touches
Deeper discoveries, her more complete revolution
Gives promise of wider benefits in larger abundance.

Where she nam'd the disease she now separates the bacillus;

418

Sets the atoms of offence, those blind and sickly bloodeaters,
'Neath lens and daylight, forcing their foul propagations,
Which had ever prosper'd in dark impunity unguest,
Now to behave in sight, deliver their poisonous extract
And their strange self-brew'd, self-slaying juice to be handled,
Experimented upon, set aside and stor'd to oppose them.

So novel and obscure a research, such hard revelations
Of Nature's cabinet,—tho' with fact amply accordant,
And by hypothesis much dark difficulty resolving,
Are not quickly receiv'd nor approv'd, and sensitive idlers,
Venturing in the profound terrible penetralia of life,
Are shock'd by a method that shuns not contamination
With cruel Nature's most secret processes unmaskt.
And yet in all mankind's disappointed history, now first
Have his scouts push'd surely within his foul enemies' lines,
And his sharpshooters descried their insidious foe,
Those swarming parasites, that barely within the detection
Of manifold search-light, have bred, swimming unsuspected
Thro' man's brain and limbs, slaying with loathly pollution
His beauty's children, his sweet scions of affection,
In fev'rous torment and tears, his home desolating
Of their fair innocence, breaking his proud passionate heart,
And his kindly belief in God's good justice arraigning.

With what wildly directed attack, what an armory illjudged,
Has he, (alas, poor man,) with what cumbrous machination
Sought to defend himself from their Lilliputian onslaught;
Aye discharging around him, in obscure night, at a venture,
Ev'ry missile which his despair confus'dly imagin'd;
His simples, compounds, specifics, chemical therapeutics,
Juice of plants, whatever was nam'd in lordly Salerno's
Herbaries and gardens, vipers, snails, all animal filth,
Incredible quackeries, the pretentious jugglery of knaves,
Green electricities, saints' bones and priestly anointings.
Fools! that oppose his one scientific intelligent hope!
Grant us an hundred years, and man shall hold in abeyance
These foul distempers, and with this world's benefactors

419

Shall Pasteur obtain the reward of saintly devotion,
His crown heroic, who fought not destiny in vain.

'Tis success that attracts: 'twas therefore so many workers
Ran pellmell to the schools of Nature in our generation,
While other employments have lack'd their genius and pined.
Our fathers' likings we thought semibarbarous, our art
Self-consciously sickens in qualms of an æsthetic aura,
Noisily in the shallows splashing and disporting uninspir'd.
Our famed vulgarities whether in speech, taste or amusement,
Are not amended: Is it foolish, hoping for a rescue,
First to appeal to the strong, for health to the healthy amongst us?
—For the Sophists' doctrine that Grace is dying of old age
I hold in derision, their inkpot theories of man,
Of his cradle of art, his deathbed of algebra;—and see
How Science has wrought, since we went idling at Eton,
One thing above surmise:—An' if I may dare to remind you
How Vergil praises your lov'd Lucretius, (of whom
My matter and metre have set you thinking, as I fear,)
In that glory which ends ‘et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari’:
Sounded not most empty to us such boast of a pagan,
Strangely to us tutor'd to believe, with faith mediæval,
Torture everlasting to be justly the portion of all souls,
Nor but by the elects' secret predestiny escaped?
If you think to reply,—making this question in answer,—
‘Did the belief disturb for a moment our pleasure in life?’
No.—And men gather in harvest on slopes of an active
Volcano: natheless the terror's enormity was there;
Now 'tis away: Science has pierced man's cloudy commonsense,
Dow'rd his homely vision with more expansive an embrace,
And the rotten foundation of old superstition exposed.
That trouble of Pascal, those vain paradoxes of Austin,
Those Semitic parables of Paul, those tomes of Aquinas,

420

All are thrown to the limbo of antediluvian idols,
Only because we learn mankind's true history, and know
That not at all from a high perfection sinfully man fell,
But from baseness arose: We have with sympathy enter'd
Those dark caves, his joyless abodes, where with ravening brutes,
Bear or filthy hyena, he once disputed a shelter:—
That was his Paradise, his garden of Eden,—abandon'd
Ages since to the drift and drip, the cementing accretions
Whence we now separate his bones buried in the stalagma,
His household makeshifts, his hunting tools, his adornments,
From the scatter'd skeletons of a lost prehistoric order,
Its mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, the machairodos, and beasts
Whose unnamed pastures the immense Atlantic inundates.

In what corner of earth lie not dispersed the familiar
Flinty relics of his old primitive stone-cutlery? what child
Kens not now the design, the adapted structure of each one
Of those hand-labor'd chert-flakes, whether axe, chisel, or knife,
Spearhead, barb of arrow, rough plane or rudely serrate saw?
Stones that in our grandsires' time told no sermon, (awaiting
Indestructible, unnumber'd, on chary attention,)
From their preadamite pulpits now cry Revelation.

Not to a Greek his chanted epic had mortal allurement,
Conjuring old-world fancies of Ilium and of Olympus,
As this story to me, this tale primæval of unsung,
Unwritten, ancestral fate and adversity, this siege
Of courage and happiness protracted so many thousand
Thousand years in a slow persistent victory of brain
And right hand o'er all the venom'd stings, sharpnesses of fang
And dread fury whate'er Nature, tirelessly devising,
Could develop with tooth, claw, tusk, or horn to oppose them.
See now Herakles, who strangled snakes when an infant
In his cradle alone; and nought but those petty stonechips

421

For the battle: 'twas wonder above wonders his achievement:
Yea, and since he thought as a child 'twas natural in him,
Meeting in existence with purposes antagonistic,
Circumstances oppos'd to desire, vast activities, which
Thwarted effort, to assume All-might as spiteful against him.
Nay, as an artist born, impell'd to devise a religion,—
So to relate himself ideally with the immortal,—
This quarrel of reason with what displeas'd his affections
Was not amiss. The desire and love of beauty possess man:
Art is of all that beauty the best outwardly presented;
Truth to the soul is merely the best that mind can imagine.
No lover eternal will hold to an older opinion
If but lovelier ideas, with Nature agreeing,
Are to his understanding offer'd...But enough: 'tis an unsolv'd
Mystery.—Yet man dreams to flatter his deity saying
‘Beautiful is Nature!’ rather 'tis various, endless,
And her efforts fertile in error tho' grand in attainment.
If we, while praising her scheme and infinite order,
Are compell'd to select, our choice condemns the remainder;
Nor can wisdom honour those loathly polluting offences,
Whose very names to the Muse are either accursed or unknown.
Nay, if such foul things thou deemest worthy, the fault was
Making us, O Nature, thy judge and tearful accuser.

Turn our thought for awhile to the symphonies of Beethoven,
Or the rever'd preludes of mighty Sebastian; Is there
One work of Nature's contrivance beautiful as these?
Judg'd by beauty alone man wins, as sensuous artist;
And for other qualities, the spirit's differentia, Nature
Scarce observes them at all: that keen unfaltering insight,
Whereby earthly desire's roaming wildernesses are changed
Into a garden a-bloom; its wandering impossible ways
Into pillar'd avenues, alleys and fair-flow'ry terrac'd walks,
(Where God talks with man, as once 'twas fancied of Eden;)
That transcendental supreme interpreting of sense,

422

Rendering intelligence passionate with mystery, linking
Sympathy with grandeur, the reserve of dignity with play;
Those soul-formalities, the balance held 'twixt the denial
And the betrayal of intention, whose masteries invite,
Entice, welcome ever, meet, and with kindliness embrace;
Those guarded floodgates of boundless, lovely resources,
Whence nothing ill issues, no distraction nor abortion
Hindering enjoyment, but in easy security flow forth
Ecstasies of fitness, raptures and harmonies of heav'n.
Surely before such work of man, so kindly attemper'd,
Nature must be asham'd, has she not this ready answer,
‘Fool, and who made thee?’—

I shall not seem a deserter,
Where in an idle essay my verse to a fancy abandon'd
Praiseth others: rather while art and beauty delight us,
While hope, faith and love are warm and lively in our hearts,
Sweet our earthly desire and dear our human affection,
We may, joyfully despising the pedantries of old age,
Hold to the time, nor lose the delight of mortal attainment;
Keenly rejoicing in all that wisdom approves, nor allowing
Ourselves at the challenge of younger craft to be outsailed;
But trimming our old canvas in all change of weather and wind,
Freely without fear urge o'erseas our good vessel onward,
Piloting into the far, unmapp'd futurity.—Farewell.

University of Virginia Library

1 EPISTLE I TO L. M. WINTRY DELIGHTS

1
EPISTLE I
TO L. M. WINTRY DELIGHTS